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Movie:		8.0
Picture:		9.0
Sound:		9.0
Extras:		8.0
Score:		8.0

Director(s):	Michael Mann
Writer(s):	Michael Mann
Starring:	Al Pacino • Ashley Judd • Dennis Haysbert • Jon Voight • Natalie Portman • Robert De Niro • Tom Sizemore • Val Kilmer
Genre:	Action • Crime Thriller • Drama
Release Date:	November 10, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	Blu-ray - $17.49
Amazon:

Near the beginning of Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman, while advising his fictional brother Donald in the fine art of screenwriting, he suggests sarcastically that he “explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” Really, he could save the time and just watch Heat. Of all the police/cop/heist crime movies of the 80s and 90s, probably none quite so completely embodies that “we’re not so different, you and I” dynamic that has been the last resort of screenwriters since the dawn of Hollywood. Nearly fifteen years on, this is both Heat’s greatest success and its greatest liability, because while nothing following in its footsteps has equaled it in scope or clarity, some of its drama has been rendered inert by the sheer number of well-funded directors who have tried, as well as by some of its own emotional limitations.

Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is everything that you would hope that a career cop would be (just to show that he’s still sane): hard-boiled, world weary, and able to prop a shotgun against his shoulder in as photogenic a way as possible. Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) is a career criminal with a well-coordinated crew, which includes Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) and Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), and has just arrived in Los Angeles in anticipation of what would seem to be a career best heist, but is in actuality just another day at the office for a collection of professional bank robbers. After an initial heist goes awry due to obligatory crazy guy Waingro (Kevin Gage, surely the inspiration for Dane Cook’s ‘not okay’ guy in his heist bit), the various pieces of McCauley’s plan start to unravel, and he and Hanna are both gradually forced into a direct confrontation with each other. Where other films would treat this process as a sort of contest of wills, Heat allows both Hanna and McCauley to look at their lives with a more than healthy degree of fatalism, letting them show one another how their lives both reflect each other, and just how meaningless their lives would be without one another.

I don’t imagine that there was ever any point during the production of Heat where they openly wondered what the big marketing draw was going to be, and the movie reflects that. Pacino and DeNiro were two performers who had been linked in the public’s consciousness ever since The Godfather Part 2, even though they had never actually shared the screen together. The mid-nineties was probably the most opportune time for such a collaboration that was bound to have some air of gimmickry, as both of their best work was behind them, but neither one had yet slunk into the self parody that each would do in their own time (could this movie have been made after Analyze This?). While there may have been better movie cops and criminals on their own, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a pair outside of Batman and the Joker that feel so destined to confront each other. The force of their collaboration (both on screen and in larger career implications) serves to crystallize the cop/criminal archetype in a way that lesser performers probably could not, as well as underscore the themes of the entire nearly three hour film. Their professionalism, their perfectionism, and their focus is perfectly reflected by Mann, who directs the film with an icy sheen that would make David Cronenberg proud. Even if this approach never sets off the emotional fireworks in the way that you might hope that a cast like this might, it gets the job done in a clean, efficient way that manages to throw many different balls into the air without letting any of them hit the ground.

This sense of detached cool wouldn’t be an issue at all if this film hadn’t also perfectly exemplified another movie cliché, which I have dubbed ‘superfluous woman’ syndrome. The film’s title refers to McCauley’s assertion that you can’t have anything in your life that you won’t walk away from ‘in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat coming around the corner’; in short, you need to be able to cut yourself off emotionally from anyone you love in order to live the kind of life that McCauley and Hanna do. In shorter, women get in the way of heists. And there are a lot of women in this movie: Hanna’s wife Justine (Diane Venora), who struggles to maintain a healthy emotional relationship with him in spite of the fact that he spends all day with dead bodies; Shiherlis’s girlfriend Charlene (Ashley Judd), who wants out of the life that he has provided for her; and McCauley’s latest side project Eady (Amy Brenneman), who seems too sweet and innocent not to be held as emotional collateral by this movie. They are all played by very capable actresses, and they are all given little to nothing else to do but sit on the sidelines and cry, pout, or yell while the men in the movie go off and shoot guns. While this might have made for very compelling drama in a tighter, fiercer film (Dirty Harry comes to mind), it’s hard to get too invested in the situation when the film does little to characterize women as anything but dead weight.

Blu-ray Bonus Features

Commentary by Michael Mann - On the whole, very intelligent. Considering how smoothly this whole movie goes down, it’s easy to forget just how much thought went into it.

The Making of ‘Heat’ - A perfectly capable if unexceptional documentary divided into three sections: True Crime, about the real life cop and criminal that inspired it; Crime Stories, about the film’s development; and Into The Fire, about the film’s production.

Pacino and DeNiro: The Conversation - An entire segment about the much celebrated coffee shop scene between Hanna and McCauley.

11 Additional Scenes - Mostly small bits that were cut out of scenes that were already in the film.

Return to the Scene of the Crime - Various members of the crew return to several shooting locations.

Theatrical Trailers.